Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

June 6, 2010

My SMX Schedule

Filed under: Main — Ryan Jones @ 1:20 pm

As many of you know, I’m headed out to SMX Advanced in Seattle this week. If you’re trying to catch me, here’s a list of the sessions I’ll be attending. This is just a temporary list though, so I may end up swapping in some more SEM classes in favor of SEO ones. If you want to get in touch with me during SMX you can try 4square (RyanJones) or Twitter (RyanJones) as I’ll be using both frequently. Or, you can try old fashioned methods like email, phone, or text message. All of my contact info is available here (in plain text AND hcard format): ryanmjones.com.

Monday

  • 6-7 Meet & Greet – Hopefully there’s free drinks.

Tuesday

  • 9am-10:15am SEO for Google Vs Bing. I’ll attempt to blog about this, but it’s early so no promises.
  • 11:00 – 12:15 Twitter, Real time Search, & Real Time SEO. I will be live blogging this one too!
  • 12:15- 1:45 (tenantive) Lunch with Google Engineer Maile Ohye
  • 1:45 – 3:00 (tenative) Show me the links: Real Life Link Building (I”m also debating on skipping this for pump up conversions)
  • 3:30-4:45 The Ultimate social media tools session. (although demystifying online attribution also sounds interesting)
  • 5:00 – 5:45 You&A With Matt Cutts. I’m going to attempt to live blog this one as well, so stay tuned!
  • 5:45 – 7:00 Expo Hall Reception. I can’t turn down free drinks and Lisa Barone stalking….
  • 8:00 – ? Bing’s Party at Olympic Sculpture Park. Again, I can’t say no to free drinks. Hoping some fellow ZAAZ employees will crash this one with me

Wednesday

  • 9:00 – 9:45 Keynote with Yusuf Mehdi. High likelyhood of me sleeping through this though as Yusuf just spoke at ZAAZ last week.
  • 10:30 – 11:45 So You Want To Test SEO – Really Hoping Jill Whalen shows up for this one. I’ll bring the boxing gloves. I’ll also be nursing a hangover
  • 11:45 – 1:30 – Lunch with some domainers. Believe it or not, domaining and search have a lot in common.
  • 1:30-2:45 I haven’t decided between Vanessa Fox’s SEO site architecture or Danny Sullivan’s Facebook marketing. I may bounce between them.
  • 3:00 – 4:15 SEO Vets Take All Comers. – The words “powerpoint free” were all I needed to see to sign up for this. This might be another live blog.
  • 6:00 – most likely not going to the SEOmoz party. Mostly because I don’t think they’d let me in!

So that’s my smx schedule. I’ll be tweeting and live blogging throughout the days, so stay tuned for updates. I’d also like to hear what sessions you’re looking forward to attending.

June 3, 2010

Reasons To Host Your Own Blog, Slacker

Filed under: Main — Ryan Jones @ 11:22 am

Sure, you’re a busy professional, I understand that. You’ve got lots to say but very little time to actually say it. When you’re struggling to find time to blog, you can’t worry about actually maintaining that blog. WordPress.com, Blogger, Blogspot, and 27 other solutions all seem simple and easy to use, and most likely work great. You don’t have to worry about installing wordpress updates, paying hosting bills, or remembering to renew a domain name, all you have to do is concentrate on writing quality posts.

Except for one problem – you’re losing out on readers, revenue, and traffic!

Just as there are tons of upsides to using a hosted blog platform, there’s tons of downsides too. Here’s 3 quick reasons why you should actually host your own blog on your own domain.

  1. Control. When you host your own blog you’re in control of everything. You can change the layout, the plugins, the content, the domain, and well, everything. Sure it means managing your own backups, but it also means that your data remains intact. As we’ve seen with URL shorteners and recently with Geocities, there’s no guarantee your data will be alive forever. You also give up control of what that site should decide to do with your data if they pull a facebook style privacy fiasco in the future. By hosting your own, you at least control for how long it stays online.
  2. IT Departments Won’t Block You. Yes, the reason I’m writing this post has something to do with disgruntlement toward my company IT department. Most filtering systems today block places like WP.com, Blogspot, etc out of the box. That means if you’re writing about business stuff, many business people can’t read your blog. Think it’s a small amount of people? Think again! I myself work in the office of one of the largest companies in the world and I can’t read techcrunch because they host their stylesheet on WP.com, and that’s blocked.
  3. It Improves Quality. As somebody who was blogging before blog was a word, I often pine for the pre-wordpress days when the only people with blogs were those who know a bit of perl. I’m trying not to sound nostalgic, but there’s something about enduring the hard work of creating a site that makes you strive for high quality content. If you’re paying for the site, there’s that extra bit of incentive to try to make it worth your money. I’m willing to wager that so many blogspot blogs go by the wayside due to lack of personal investment in the blog by the writer.

If you’re going to blog, don’t be a slacker and do it right from the start. Grab yourself a domain name and some hosting, install your platform of choice on it, and start cranking out the quality content. It will not only make you a better writer, but doing things yourself will make you a more experienced IT professional – especially when it comes to familiarity with things like SEO, Programming, Hosting, etc.

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